Musopen - Learn › Copyright Law
Copyright Law
The single reason this website has not existed prior to this, is due to the complexity of copyright laws. These laws can be so confusing, even simple questions like "can I play a CD in public?" can become overwhelming for non-legal experts.
Musopen has contacted several lawyers and has done its own research to ensure, to the best of our ability, that we have covered every liability and legal loop hole. We do not exist to make money, we do not want to sell music, we do not want to discourage others from selling CDs, we simply exists to encourage interest and education in music. We hope that by providing public domain music to the public, record comapnies will not rely as much on old classics for revenue and will invest more money on new composers or new arrangements of old works.
Why Musopen? Isn't it obvious, don't download illegally?
One would hope it ends there. Downloading a recently released CD on a peer-to-peer network is illegal, that is obvious. However, there still exists a great deal of confusion once we move beyond that.
Ex: Capitol Records vs. Naxos
Naxos is one example of moving into the grey area of copyright law. Naxos took a public domain recording in England, improved the sound quality and re-sold it as their product. This is entirely legal for anyone to due to a public domain record. Capitol Records, the company which sold the original recoding of course disagreed, and argued it was not in th epublic domain. Capitol Records lost the first trial, and won the appeal. Due to this litigation, the copyright of works recorded in the early 1930's and later have been extended to at least 2067. Even when you think something is in the public domain, complications from laws overseas may not make that so.
I have tried to accurately summarize the rules for this website to act in a legal manner.
Wikipedia Entry on Copyright Law
More on Public Domain - UC Copyright